I understand your argument (reusing capture groups for untainting was a mistake of the premature reuse of a feature), but I don't see the current situation as an onerous burden.

That's interesting and is getting me to wonder if I am not worrying about scenarios that don't happen in practice.

What do you make of the various situations that I outline in this page: http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=1002207. Are these things that typically don't happen in practice? And if so, can you explain why that is? Or maybe you don't find that checking for taintedness before every print to STDOUT, every regexp match and every call to a third party library is not onerous, and you feel confident that you never forget to do it?

BTW: I am not saying this to be sarcastic. I am more than open to the possibillity that I am imagining nightmare scenarios that don't happen in practice. I am also more than open to the possibilities that some programmers are able to think about checking for taintedness before every print, regexp match or third party library call (I'm just not one of them ;-)).